Lib at Large: For San Anselmo musician Alden, the poems of Yeats are 'folk songs waiting to be born'

MARIN SINGER-SONGWRITER Kyle Alden has been to Ireland many times, touring with Irish musicians from the Bay Area and making friends in Ireland along the way. On his most recent trip, though, he found himself with an unexpected and rather uncanny companion — the spirit of the great Irish poet and playwright William Butler Yeats.

"I go to Ireland every few years," Alden said. "But this time, for some reason, Yeats was sort of following me around."

An accomplished guitar, fiddle and mandolin player, Alden was in Ireland last year with the traditional Irish band the Gas Men. He was staying with one of his bandmates in Gort, County Galway, a West Ireland countryside with rocky fields and gray stone walls and an enduring tradition of Irish music. Yeats (1865-1939) once lived there with his wife and daughter in the renovated tower of a 16th-century Norman castle, and he often strolled in the town's Coole Park, immortalized in his poem "The Wild Swans at Coole."

"When I arrived in this part of West Ireland, I wasn't thinking about Yeats in one way or another," Alden recalled. "But my hosts would mention that this was where Yeats lived, and encouraged me to go down to Coole Park and wander around, which I did. So he kind of percolated into my awareness."

When he got back to Marin, the 54-year-old musician dusted off an old collection of Yeats' poems and made copies of the ones that most sounded to him like lyrics to songs. Then he put them on a music stand, sat down with his guitar and let magic happen. He was startled when one of the poems, "The Cap and Bells," "leapt off the page as a fully formed song," as he describes it, and a dozen others followed suit.

"It was like they were folk songs waiting to be born," he said. "I couldn't believe these weren't lyrics to old songs. There was no effort in setting them to music. These songs just began emerging. It was a matter of staying out of the way of them."

An architect as well as a musician, Alden recorded the Yeats material in a studio he designed just up a winding path from the century-old house on a San Anselmo hilltop that he shares with his wife, Maria.

For the recording sessions, Alden enlisted an enviable cast of musicians, including Bay Area mandolin virtuoso Mike Marshall, former Frank Zappa band bassist Scott Thunes and violinist Ethena Tergis, a featured soloist with the Dublin Philharmonic Orchestra.

Released as an independent CD, "Songs from Yeats' Bee-Loud Glade" was inspired melodically by Irish music, but also by the American folk-rock Alden absorbed growing up in Marin County in the 1970s.

"My first Grateful Dead concert was in 1970 at Pepperland in San Rafael when I was 13 years old and my parents had to pick me up," he remembered. "So I'm a Marin County kid who got into folk music through the folk-rock of the Grateful Dead and the Jefferson Airplane. That was tremendously influential, and I just began following that muse."

That muse led him into writing songs and playing bass for the ironically named Young Republicans, an '80s punk band that played at the legendary Mabuhay Gardens in San Francisco and the original Sleeping Lady Cafe in Fairfax. He earned a degree in English literature from Reed College. And as he matured as a person and musician, he found that traditional Irish music stirred something inside him that went beyond ethnicity or culture.

"Irish music wasn't an intellectual choice," he explained. "And I'm not Irish myself. I'm of Scottish, Welsh and English background. But it was the music that spoke to me. With Irish music, you're part of an unbroken tradition that goes back hundreds of years. I didn't know this when I entered into it, but I could feel the depth and the breadth of the music."

For the past 20 years, Alden has been in demand as an accompanying guitarist for Irish musicians at concerts, dances and pub sessions. In 1993, under his given name, Kyle Thayer (Alden is his middle name), he recorded and released "Rainshadow," an independent album on which he performed original and traditional tunes on octave mandolin, an instrument used primarily in Irish music. Since joining the Gas Men 2½ years ago, he has performed in Cuba and Argentina as well as Ireland.

Now, with "Bee-Loud Glade," Alden has gone beyond Irish music, honoring one of Ireland's greatest literary figures, perhaps bringing his poetry to people who might not otherwise hear it. As part of the deal he struck with the Yeats estate, he included a booklet in the CD package with the unaltered versions of the poems he set to music.

"As a titan of 20th-century letters, Yeats is too big for me to get cozy with," Alden admitted. "And yet we've met out there somewhere and collaborated on a project that I came to with a great deal of respect and reverence and humility."